Egypt has revived a decades-old agricultural project in its Western Desert in bid to meet the growing population demands and bridge a wide gap between food production and consumption in it.
The Toshka project, Egypt’s first serious attempt to invade its vast desert, was launched by late President Hosni Mubarak in 1997. The project was Mubarak’s ambitious plan to create the New Delta in the middle of the desert and bring about economic development that would affect positive social change in his country.
He distributed the land of the project, around 540,000 acres, to local and Arab investors, hoping the private sector would drive reclamation efforts in it and spare his government the burden of providing the investments needed by it.
A few years later, however, the project came to a screeching halt. Mubarak-era ministers attribute the failure of the project to the lack of necessary investments and political will. The project had slipped into oblivion since then, being overtopped by Egypt’s political developments, including Mubarak’s 2011 downfall and the turmoil that swept through it after this.
Revival of the project
In October 2020, incumbent President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered the revival of the project and specified 6.4 billion Egyptian pounds (around $413 million) for the needed infrastructure, breathing new life into national hopes for turning the desert green.
“Reclaiming more land, including in the desert, has always been an important strategy to increase food production,” Essam Seyam, an agricultural economics professor at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor.
Located around 225 kilometers southwest of the Upper Egyptian city of Aswan, Toshka will act as a link between several Western Desert oases. The project will focus on the production of important crops such as wheat, maize, cotton and oil. It will also include the Middle East’s largest date palm farm that will cover 37,000 acres.
The farm will contain 2.3 million date palms, 1.35 million of which have already been planted over 21,000 acres. Sisi’s agricultural expansion plan aims to compensate for the land Egypt lost in the past decades in the Nile Valley and Delta to its urban crush and produce more food for the country’s growing population.
The scheme aspires to increase Egypt’s farmland to around 9.5 million acres from 8 million acres at present. It is to be implemented across Egypt, including in the Sinai Peninsula and in other parts of the Western Desert.
